NASA's Innovative Ion Space Thruster Sets Endurance World Record

Check it out guys. Nasa has been testing a new Ion thruster for the last 5 years and it is a success. This bodes well for Deep Space Travel as Ion
engines can burn much longer than traditional rockets, allowing for eventual higher Speeds.

I think this is very cool. 3-D printed food for longer trips in Space, Exoskeletons suits, Exploration Rovers, Space colonies, etc. The future is
here.

I wonder where they got this technology from?? It makes absolutely zero sense to me that out of nowhere, in the last fifty years, somehow mankind has
been able to advance from nothing into things out of a sci-fi movie. The Truth behind it all is probably very well covered up. The praise that goes to
the people who "invented' this is completely undeserved and should be giving credit where credit is due.

The first person to publish mention of the idea was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1911.[2] However, the first documented instance where the
possibility of electric propulsion is considered is found in Robert H. Goddard's handwritten notebook in an entry dated 6 September 1906.[3] The
first experiments with ion thrusters were carried out by Goddard at Clark University from 1916–1917.[4] The technique was recommended for
near-vacuum conditions at high altitude, but thrust was demonstrated with ionized air streams at atmospheric pressure. The idea appeared again in
Hermann Oberth's "Wege zur Raumschiffahrt” (Ways to Spaceflight), published in 1923, where he explained his thoughts on the mass savings of
electric propulsion, predicted its use in spacecraft propulsion and attitude control, and advocated electrostatic acceleration of charged gases.[2]

A working ion thruster was built by Harold R. Kaufman in 1959 at the NASA Glenn Research Center facilities. It was similar to the general design of a
gridded electrostatic ion thruster with mercury as its fuel. Suborbital tests of the engine followed during the 1960s and in 1964 the engine was sent
into a suborbital flight aboard the Space Electric Rocket Test 1 (SERT 1). It successfully operated for the planned 31 minutes before falling back to
Earth.[5] This test was followed by an orbital test, SERT-2, in 1970.

An alternate form of electric propulsion, the Hall effect thruster was studied independently in the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hall effect thrusters had operated on Soviet satellites since 1972. Until the 1990s they were mainly used for satellite stabilization in North-South
and in East-West directions. Some 100-200 engines completed their mission on Soviet and Russian satellites until the late 1990s.[6] Soviet thruster
design was introduced to the West in 1992 after a team of electric propulsion specialists, under the support of the Ballistic Missile Defense
Organization, visited Soviet laboratories.

Space isnt a total vacuum. The space between galaxies can be as little as 1 atom per cubic meter, however its never totally empty. Inside galaxies,
its much higher, and these atoms slow an object when the object hits them, just like if you driving your car and you hit a deer, while your car may
not come to stop, it looses momentum and energy.

The general principle is the same in space, although coasting is easier and takes less energy than coasting through air (or water) with the same
amount of mass, there is still drag on the object, slowing it down.

So over the course of many years, or decades, and if you are trying to accelerate and hold enormous speeds that are whole percentages of the speed of
light, all those atoms you strike are really going to add up and slow you down. The higher the speed, the more energy youll need to expend to continue
moving at that speed. Also doubling your speed does not mean you need double the energy to hold that speed; you actually need many times more energy
than you did. So as speed increases linearly, energy to maintain that speed increases exponentially.

Space isnt a total vacuum. The space between galaxies can be as little as 1 atom per cubic meter, however its never totally empty. Inside galaxies,
its much higher, and these atoms slow an object when the object hits them, just like if you driving your car and you hit a deer, while your car may
not come to stop, it looses momentum and energy.

The principle is the same in space, although coasting is easier and takes less energy than coasting through air (or water) with the same amount of
mass, there is still drag on the object, slowing it down.

Hmmm, ok I'll give you that but just how much difference would a few atoms make? I imagine ejecting a poop out the back end of the ship would
accelerate them more than the atoms would slow them

If you were going 10,000 mph, not much difference. If you were trying to move 10,000 miles per second, there would be a massive difference between
moving through a kinda-vacuum and a real vacuum, such difference that drag isnt really the issue at that point; its how to keep the ship from
disintegrating from the sand blaster of atoms its being run through, because its not just going to lose momentum, its going to actually lose material
off the hull.

Hitting even a pebble at that speed would completely destroy the ship. Depending on the pebbles size and the ships speed, it could be exactly the same
as being hit with something ranging between a cruise missile to a hydrogen bomb. And thats not exaggeration.

If you were going 10,000 mph, not much difference. If you were trying to move 10,000 miles per second, there would be a massive difference between
moving through a kinda-vacuum and a real vacuum, such difference that drag isnt really the issue at that point; its how to keep the ship from
disintegrating from the sand blaster of atoms its being run through, because its not just going to lose momentum, its going to actually lose material
off the hull.

Hitting even a pebble at that speed would completely destroy the ship. Depending on the pebbles size and the ships speed, it could be exactly the same
as being hit with something ranging between a cruise missile to a hydrogen bomb. And thats not exaggeration.

edit on 9/26/2013 by CaticusMaximus because: (no reason given)

I agree about the sandblasting effect, but the slowing down I still got a problem with, for example why do comets continue to travel through space?
Those that orbit our planet have been doing so for millions of years and they're still going, and they dont have power, surely thats evidence that
"atoms" are not having much effect?

From what babylonstew told me, with the Earth and Mars in their optimum positions, traveling at a constant acceleration of 1 G, (32 feet per second) a
space craft would reach Mars in one month. although deceleration would be rather fierce.

Spacecraft traveling through miles of space require energy to keep moving.

Can anyone explain why this is so?
I understand that power is needed to increase speed but surely when in space, once something is moving it should keep moving?

The answer is: Gravity.

Anything that has mass has a gravitational field. The smaller that mass the smaller the field and vice versa.

Our sun has a large influence on things very far from it due to how massive it is (and in turn, stars more massive have a greater amount of pull at a
further distance).

When we launch a space craft, if we want it to leave the Earth's gravity well, to where the gravity of the Earth no longer influences it, we have to
accelerate it to a certain speed.....AND it has to get a certain distance from the Earth (about 1.5 million miles). Once a space craft is that far
from the Earth, the gravity from our planet will no longer influence that space craft.

However, at that point the sun's gravity takes over, and again, if you do not want your space craft to end up going into orbit around the sun, you
will have to increase it's speed even more......and start to move away from the sun.

All the probes that we have sent out to deep space have our sun tugging on them. The further you get out, the less that tug is, and if you accelerate
your craft fast enough, it can maintain that speed easier the further from the sun it gets.

Then of course there is the path of your craft: Is it going to pass near other planet's who's gravitational field might also influence your craft's
path? If so you may have to accelerate again.

Finding out what a body of mass gravitation field is (in distance) one can use the Hill Sphere
Formula.

Comets as you mentioned in another post, have the sun tug on them so that as they are headed out, the start to slow down, until eventually they are
pulled back, getting faster and faster the closer they get to the sun, where they slingshot around, and are flung back out......only to be slowed down
again until they eventually are pulled back in again.

Space craft like Voyager 1 and 2, were accelerated by flinging them around planets to make them go faster and faster, else they would have to of
constantly accelerated to maintain the speed needed to escape our solar system.

The Ion Engine has the capability to acclerating a craft to very large velocities, faster than chemical rockets. But, it takes them a very long time
to get to those speeds. The beauty of it is, they can do that constant acceleration for years on end to achieve that velocity.

I wonder where they got this technology from?? It makes absolutely zero sense to me that out of nowhere, in the last fifty years, somehow mankind has
been able to advance from nothing into things out of a sci-fi movie. The Truth behind it all is probably very well covered up. The praise that goes to
the people who "invented' this is completely undeserved and should be giving credit where credit is due.

Fifty years before that in 1913, we had steam power, electricity, wireless radio was starting to be used, aircraft, cars, refridgeration.....

Fifty years before that in 1863, they had steam power and here in the US, the year before was the Homestead Act, where people were given 160 acres of
land out in the midwest for $10.00, where they were learning how to farm. A new plow was invented by John Deere that had a steel blade to cut through
the tough grass lands, and a new fangled thing call the Harvester was invented that allowed farmers the ability to harvest vast amounts of crops in a
short amount of time, and we had the telegraph.........

Run it the other way around and you see something: people having to spend less time providing for themselves and more time dedicated to thinking,
learning and yes: inventing. Better yet, more people are being born, more people are being educated, raising the potential to have more educated
people, which increases your chances of new discoveries and inventions.

Then you have the things that are invented: they help lead to more things being invented and more things being improved upon. How this happens is not
a straight inclined line, but happens expotentially.

You say you have a hard time believing that we have what we have compared to 50 years ago.

I say we would have a LOT more if we as humans spent less time funding our militarys and trying to kill each other off, and more time learning and
developing.

But look at it this way, 2,000 years ago people were riding horses and using horse drawn chariots.
1,900 years later in 1900 most of the world was still riding horses and using horse drawn carriages as the primary means of transportation.

in the next 110 years from 1900 to 2010 we went from rudimentary internal combustion engines to
ion powered space engines.

so it isn`t so much the atoms crashing into the space ship that slows it down as it is gravity from massive celestial bodies that slows the ship
down?

Correct.

While things like interstellar dust, etc can cause drag if it's dense enough to slow a craft down, gravity has much more of an impact on things in
space.

Why has the Earth not slowed down whipping around the sun? Because the sun itself is pulling on the Earth. That is why we can orbit it (or why things
orbit the Earth or other bodies). Earth is falling towards the sun: in a circle, so it never can get to the sun, because it does so at almost 67,000
Mph.

Slow the Earth down (which given the Earth's mass and velocity, with Ke = 1/2*(M * V^2), that would take a mind boggling amount of energy to do), and
it will start to fall in towards the sun in a smaller circle.
Slow it down enough, and it will become a spiral and curtains for Earth.

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